The Ecology of Commerce

A Declaration of Sustainability

The Ecology of Commerce outlines the environmentally destructive aspects of many
current business practices, and offers the vision of businesses adopting new practices to
promote environmental restoration.

Praise for The Ecology of Commerce

"Its sheer volume of new ideas coupled with Hawken's elegant style of disclosure makes almost
all business books pale beside it. The tonnage of new publications on environmental degradation
and what to do about it reflects increasing concern, but rarely has that concern been so
productively expressed."-- Michael Pellecchia, Dallas Morning News

"The Ecology of Commerce is nothing less than an economic and cultural masterpiece,
by the poet laureate of American capitalism."--George Gendron, Editor-in-Chief, Inc.

"This is, in my view, the first extensive, truly ecological analysis of business; deeply
disturbing and yet full of hope. Essential reading for all who care about our planet."--Fritjof
Capra

"Environmentalists usually assume business is the enemy and vice versa. If Hawken is right,
and he's got a good track record, the environmental perspective is the only way business
will prosper, and business may be the only way to achieve a healthy planet. This goes beyond
the revolutionary to the essential. Must reading for eco freaks and pinstripes, and
anyone else who cares about living."--Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute

National Bestseller

Quotes from The Ecology of Commerce

"The dirty secret in environmentalism is that there is no such thing as sustainability.
Habitats can endure over millennia, but it's practically impossible to calculate the sustainability
of specific fisheries, tracts of land, and actual forests. We have also probably already
passed the point where present planetary resources can be relied on to support the population
of the next forty years. Any viable economic program must turn back the resource clock and
devote itself actively to restoring damaged and deteriorating systems--restoration is far
more compelling than the algebra of sustainability."

"Why, then, do we accept the excuses? Why do we hand business a blank check and exempt enterprise
from the responsibility for maintaining social values? One reason might be that . . . we
have only a piecemeal view of events. We have no [way to] accumulate the overall image of
cumulative destruction. Furthermore, their actions are defended--I daresay have to
be defended--because most of us are dependent upon them for our livelihood. Even a declining
General Motors still employs nearly 600,000 people. A supermarket chain such as American
Stores employs 200,000 or more. The 400 companies profiled in Everybody's Business Almanac employ
or support one-fourth of the U.S. population. . . . The average large business is 16,500
times larger than the average small business. And since much of the population is now employed
by these large corporations, they naturally see their interest as being linked to the success
and growth of their employers. Such fealty resembles the allegiance that sustained feudal
baronies; the vassal serfs believed that the lord who exploited them was better than the
uncertainty of no lord at all. But in the competitive world of modern commerce, loyalty to
the system prevents an objective examination of how market capitalism can also work against
those who serve it."

"We should not be surprised then, that there is deep-seated unwillingness to face the necessary
reconstruction of our commercial institutions so that they function on behalf of our lives.
Business believes that if it does not continue to grow and instead cuts back and retreats,
it will destroy itself. Ecologists believe that if business continues its unabated expansion
it will destroy the world around it. This book will discuss a third way, a path that restores
the natural communities on earth but uses many of the historically effective organizational
and market techniques of free enterprise."

"The cumulative impact of corporate crime is a deep-seated, 'free-floating' cynicism and
distrust regarding big business. If we are to create a commercial culture that does no harm
to natural and human communities, society will have to define commercial crime more effectively,
and begin to see it as something less than inevitable, and more than excusable."

"What misleads citizens in the richer nations is that we in the industrialized North are
very well provided for indeed: with some notable exceptions, we either don't see, don't experience,
or choose to ignore the impact our lives have. It is difficult for us to imagine that the
ecological principle of carrying capacity can significantly affect us. Between the advertisements
for Eddie Bauer, Jeeps, the suburbs, and the mall, we assume that we're not taking too much
from our environment, or we would see more signs of stress and deterioration around us. Our
comfort and abundance is the foundation for the great differences we see in public debate
and private discussions about the environment. . . . We confuse our rate and ability to consume
with the capacity of living systems to provide for those wants."

"Those who argue that we need to grow our way out of ecological problems do not acknowledge
a profound and troubling contradiction: If the population of China lived as well as the population
of Japan or France or the United Stated, we would endure untold ecological devastation. Even
as we invoke economic pieties to justify multinational expansion and 'freer' trade policies,
the actual result of helping the world raise itself by its bootstraps has been the opposite:
By 1990, the lowest quintile in the world income had become twice as poor when compared to
the top quintile than it was in 1960. The benefits of global expansion are highly concentrated
in the northern countries, and in the hands of corporations and their owners. . . you cannot
grow out of a problem if it is embedded in the thing that is growing, or as the Somalians
say, you cannot wake up a man who is pretending to be asleep."

"We may have already surpassed the point at which we can sustainably support the world's
population using present standards of production and consumption. That disturbing possibility
should impel us to seek, as sensibly and quickly as possible, an integration of our wants
and needs as expressed and served by commerce, with the capacity of the earth, water, forests,
and fields to meet them. Thus, this book proposes three approaches, all guided by the example
of nature. The first is to obey the waste-equals-food principle and entirely eliminate waste
from our industrial production. . . . The second principle is to change from an economy based
on carbon to one based on hydrogen and sunshine. . . . Third , we must create systems of
feedback and accountability that support and strengthen restorative behavior, whether they
are in resource utilities, green fees on agricultural chemicals, or reliance on local production
and distribution. . . . All three recommendations have a single purpose: to reduce substantially
the impact that each of us has upon our environment. . . . We have to be able to imagine
a life where having less is truly more satisfying, more interesting, and of course, more
secure."

Table of Contents of The Ecology of Commerce

A Teasing Irony

The Death of Birth

The Creation of Waste

Parking Lots and Potato Heads

Pigou's Solution

The Size Thing

Private Lives and Corporate Rights

When an Ethic is Not an Ethic

The Opportunity of Insignificance

Restoring the Guardian

Pink Salmon and Green Fees

The Inestimable Gift of a Future

Reader Reviews of The Ecology of Commerce

Mr. Hawken, I just wanted to tell you how much I have enjoyed reading your book, The
Ecology of Commerce. I like to think of myself as environmentally aware of industrial
pollution, but you have opened my eyes to the real problem of economic degradation of our
environment. I think your solutions for a restoractive economy are nothing short of brilliant.
You have given us who care some hope that there can be a better tomorrow in the plutocracy
we live in. Thank you very much.

Luke S. Harding, Charlton, NY, April 1997

As a recent graduate of Cornell University's Department of Natural Resources, I had contemplated
the pursuit of an advanced degree in a research science, such as ornithology, but I was concerned
for the plight of our environment and society and felt that I needed to somehow make a dramatic
contribution to the fight to save our resources and our culture. I read Hawken's book after
graduating (I got it for a dollar at Cornell's bookstore), and now I know what I want to
do. I am applying for a master's in environmental/ ecological economics in the fall of 1998,
and I cannot wait to use my passion for the environment in a field that will have direct
impacts on the state of our natural and business worlds. Thank you for selling such an important
literary work.